Tsunami Seen From a High-Rise

After the Asian tsunami of December 2004, a picture (top) began to circulate online showing an enormous wave, hundreds of feet high, bearing down on a city. The accompanying caption read:

This picture is not a fake. It appears to have been taken from a hi-rise building window in downtown Phuket Thailand. The power of nature is hard to comprehend, especially the destructiveness of water.

The image was fake. For a start, the caption was wrong since the city in the photo was not Phuket. People quickly identified it as the skyline of Antofagasta, Chile (bottom, image from World City Photos). But such a scene had never occurred in Antofagasta. Instead, the gigantic wave had been digitally inserted into the picture.

The size of the wave was another flaw. Eyewitness accounts of the Asian tsunami reported that the water came inland as a steadily increasing swell, not as a towering super-wave.